GURPS PDF Challenge Review: Action 7: Mercenaries

Mercenaries unlocked ninth in the GURPS PDF Challenge.  This continues the Action series by offering a "campaign lens" to further customize your Action campaign.

My executive summary is: this is good! It wasn't what I expected, but I really enjoyed it nonetheless.  It's chock-full of ideas, and if you're at a loss as to what to do with GURPS Action, this makes a great entry-way into a campaign. I would very much welcome a variety of books like this for action, even at this word count.  Like GURPS Action 6: this is a very economical book that squeezes everything it can out of its word count, and at $3, you'll feel like you underpaid for it.

 Have you ever wanted to run the Expendables in GURPS? This is the book for you.

The Briefing

The book breaks down into three sections:

• Mercenary Campaigns, a discussion of how to run Action with mercenaries
  
• Firefights, some rules for speeding up play (including the BATTLE system)
  
• Let's Go Home, which talks about long-term Mercenary campaigns.

Mercenary Campaigns

I would argue that Chapter 1 is the real meat-and-potatoes of the book, even though it's not what people are going to talk about. It breaks down how to set up a Mercenary campaign in TL 6, 7 and 8, adds some lenses for generic Action, discusses how best to use Specialists to create individual mercenaries, reprints some cinematic rules from GURPS Gun Fu and discusses a concept called "Combat Zone BAD" which abstracts all the difficulty of an entire theater for the purposes of abstracting difficulty (including things like not getting sick or for your survival rolls when bivouacking, etc) and Merc Units as Patrons.

I think this is probably the most important chapter, because it illustrates how to shift the generics of GURPS Action into the specifics of a mercenary campaign.  Action is a bit of an odd-man-out in the Framework series (though I think you can make the case that After the End follows a similar mode): DF and Monster Hunter both make a lot of fairly specific decisions, and while you have plenty of wiggle room and you can reverse engineer some decisions, it shuts out a lot of material.  Action doesn't, really.  Rather, it mostly just digests some of the rules in a particular direction, but still leaves the game wide open. The upside of this is that GURPS Action is broadly useful to everyone (hence why it serves as a basis for Psi-Wars), but as a downside, it still leaves a lot of work for you.  Mercenaries digests these rules further, and I think that helps a lot.  I'd love to see a cops version and a heist version.

Firefights

Chapter 2 is the sexy chapter, though, the one everyone will talk about. It tackles "BATTLEs", "Opportunities," "Challenges" and "Casualties." In principle, these look like one cohesive piece, but I think in practice, you can see BATTLEs and casualties as one thing, and Opportunities and Challenges as its own thing.

BATTLE is just an abstracted version of the Mass Combat system that has been "dumbed down" for Action. In this version, we ignore numerical superiority, the benefits of combined arms, broad strategic choices, and just have the leader roll Tactics with a difficulty of BAD, with individual combat scenes acting as complementary rolls and the previous results rolling over (so you'll want to win as much as possible as early on as possible, and if you're losing, maybe see if you can work out some smaller battles that better favor you to build some momentum).  This is the sort of thing that sounds dumb and obvious, but I think it's brilliant.  It takes work to make something this concise, small, obvious and useful.  The more BAD it is, the more obvious that they're going to have solid discipline and tactics; the less BAD it is, the more obvious that they'll lack discipline and have crappy weapons, etc. Numbers don't matter because there's always "Enough" for the scene that you want. I also approve of Tactics over Strategy, as this is a much more immediate sort of fight: the kind that you can see on a movie screen, rather than men moving giant units around on a map.

I have a few complaints, though.  There's not much discussion of complementary rolls. It feels more like "Each player gets a moment if the GM gives it to them, and they'll probably pull it off, so it's +1 per player." You can do more than that, like have things like "Can you defuse this bomb in time," or "can you take that machine-gun next in 2d6 turns or less?" but there's not really a lot of support for that here.  That's a word-count issue, though, and could be indefinite in length: you can always say more about that and offer more ideas.  My other complaint is meant to be handled by the Casualties section. Your units are likely to be small: 5-20 people, would be my guess.  So -10% in casualties is often going to mean one specific guy. Who? Well, the casualties section essentially says "It could be anyone."  What is a "casualty?" "Interpret it liberally." Look, there's nothing here that you couldn't work out on your own, so perhaps it's not worth the word-count to delve into, but it'll be a question that comes up, and the book doesn't answer it that well.

As to the question of "What sort of cool encounters can we have in the midst of these battles," that seems to be handled by Challenges and Opportunities, but they seem to do more than that.  They're a broad set of ideas for spicing up your campaign.  You can use them in a BATTLE, I think, but you're better off picking a few Challenges before a battle to work out some complications you can hit your players with, which could be handled as Complementary Combat scenes, above.  The opportunities don't work as well as bits to toss the players way in a firefight, but more as interesting things that could happen over the course of the adventure.  For example, one of them is that you might find a Billionaire's Kidnapped Granddaughter. Cool!  Probably not something that happens in the midst of shooting at people, but it could, and it's also not something that's likely to affect the outcome, but it would certainly change the course of the adventure.  Challenges can be used this way too: a minefield might represent an interesting challenge by itself, or as something you can toss into a firefight as a surprise when one of your mook allies gets blown up, or someone steps on a mine and you need to disarm it while bullets are whizzing past.

Let's Go Home

This is a one-page summary on handling long-term campaigns, including randomized conflict zones ("Brutistan is a Tropical Dicatorship/Monarchy"), whether or not you improved in rank or lost rank or the ability to make ARs for an adventure, etc.

Manly Reminiscences

What you end up with this book is not just how to run a Mercenary campaign in Action, but a campaign generator.  Our mercs might to go Brutistan and participate in the putting down a revolt against the Monarchy that's really being fronted by a military dictatorship.  We could allow the players to find the kidnapped daughter of the king, held by the bad rebels, only to be betrayed by the military forces who want to secure her for some dastardly reason and end up fighting both sides while dodging landmines, and trying to either negotiate a new deal or get extracted. Great fun, and I just go this from reading the book.

It's usefulness extends beyond TL 6-8 Mercenary campaigns.  It's utility in THS or some Cyberpunk TL 9 world should be fairly obvious, though it would take a bit of work.  I'd definitely use the BATTLE system in Psi-Wars, as quickly handling a big battle between two different sides is pretty much exactly what I want out of Psi-Wars.  Just shrugging and saying "One side will win or lose" diminishes the role of the officer, but worrying about the TSes of Valiants and Javelins and Space Knights shifts the focus from where it should be.  BATTLE is a perfect compromise and deserves all the praise it's getting.

So, yes, this book gets a big thumbs up from me.  It wasn't what I wanted, it was what I needed.  

 

As an aside, I find it amusing that Action 6 muttered ominously about introducing military-grade weapons to Action, and then Action 7 says "YAY! Military grade weapons!" I still don't get why Action 6 was so down on military stuff.  That's why Flesh Wounds are a thing!

Also, we're back to some great artwork.